4 Film Series to Catch in NYC This Weekend

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Andrew Bleechington stars in “Life and Nothing More,” one of the below-the-radar picks from Film Comment magazine’s critics. It will screen on Friday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.CreditCreditCFI Releasing

Our guide to film series and special screenings happening this weekend and in the week ahead. All our movie reviews are at nytimes.com/reviews/movies.

ATHENA FILM FESTIVAL at Barnard College (through Feb. 25). Named for the goddess of wisdom, this weekend-long film festival is devoted to movies in which women are the driving narrative force. The lineup features several films from the past year, including “Lady Bird” and “Patti Cake$” (both Friday); “Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story” (Saturday), which remembers the actress’s contribution to a communication system during World War II; and the New York premiere of “I Am Not a Witch” (Saturday), which won praise last spring at Directors’ Fortnight, a festival that runs parallel to the main Cannes Film Festival slate.athenafilmfestival.com

FILM COMMENT SELECTS at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (Feb. 23-27). The staff members of Film Comment magazine (whose editor in chief, Nicolas Rapold, has contributed to The New York Times) share some of their below-the-radar favorites from the festival circuit and elsewhere. The program opens on Friday with “Life and Nothing More,” the story of an African-American teenager and his single mother that unfolds with documentarylike immediacy. Other titles are “Gutland” (Saturday), a sedate sort-of noir about a German thief (Frederick Lau) who crosses the border to hide from police and falls into the arms of a local played by Vicky Krieps (“Phantom Thread”), and “Sarah Plays a Werewolf” (Sunday), about a high school actress who begins to mix fiction and reality in her own life. The revivals include a retrospective of the confrontational cinema of Nico Papatakis and a 25th-anniversary screening of “Silverlake Life: The View From Here” (Sunday), a landmark AIDS documentary that influenced the recent “BPM.”212-875-5601, filmlinc.org

‘PHANTOM THREAD’ WITH LIVE SCORE at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House (Feb. 24-25). Purists beware. All Radiohead fans, do not miss? The latest entry in Paul Thomas Anderson’s gallery of impossible men (“Punch-Drunk Love,” “There Will Be Blood” and “The Master”), starring Daniel Day-Lewis as an intransigent fashion designer and Vicky Krieps as the muse who finally gets him to bend, will screen with Jonny Greenwood’s Oscar-nominated score performed live by the Wordless Music Orchestra and members of the London Contemporary Orchestra, which played a similar event across the pond last month. Your ears will be dazzled, your eyes maybe less so. Note that for technical reasons, the movie will screen in HDCAM, which has a lower resolution than conventional digital projection.718-636-4100, bam.org

‘SEE IT BIG! BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY IN BLACK AND WHITE AND COLOR’ at the Museum of the Moving Image (Feb. 24-March 11). Given the degree to which digital postproduction has blurred the line between cinematography and special effects, it may be time for the Academy to create a new Oscar. Call it Best Visual Design? Such a move wouldn’t be unprecedented. For years, the Academy gave two cinematography Oscars, one for black-and-white and one for color. This series puts some of the winners head-to-head: The Technicolor “Gone With the Wind” and the black-and-white “Wuthering Heights,” which both won in 1940, each screen on Saturday and Sunday. “Black Narcissus” and “Great Expectations,” the winners in 1948, show the following weekend.718-784-0077, movingimage.us